Update:Journamalism from Pete Thamel, author of the now-infamous Sports Illustrated cover story. Short version: Te’o gave Thamel an enormous amount of information about his imaginary girlfriend and her family, none of which he was able to verify. So I guess the moral of the story is that fact-checking at SI only requires checking into purported facts, as opposed to actually verifying any of them, at least if the story is good enough.

Comments (50)

It’s quite possible for the same guy to be both an inspirational cancer survivor and a PED cheater.

And, of course, making a big deal of Armsstrong’s PED use is a bit . . .odd, when they can’t find anyone to whom they can award his titles who was not using PEDs. Maybe this is all necesary to clean up a corrupt sport, I guess, but I’d feel better about the result if they had stepped in and cleaned up the sport a couple of decades ago, leaving a level playing field for a clean Armstrong.

People are making a big deal out of it because for years Armstrong was a sanctimonious bully who pointed his finger at everyone else, copped a “how DARE you” attitude toward people who wondered about him, and intimidated people into shutting up, going as far as threatening legal action against people. He used his cancer survival as a shield against these accusations which are, whaddaya know, true.

There are also stories about how he used his charity as a slush fund, or at least misrepresented whether he or the foundation would be paid for his participation in fundraising events, and behaved like a dick to the people paying him while doing it.

1. The cancer survivor who returned from death’s door to be the greatest champion of the most prestigious stage race in the world, and who incidentally saved the sport from itself after the doping scandals of the late ’90s.
2. The ringleader of the greatest doping conspiracy in known human history.
3. The penitent outcast who confesses, repents, and makes good for his sins, thereby saving the sport from itself again (or the vile pretender who exposes himself as a sham and who is cast away from his betters into the pit, take yer pick).

Funny thing is how the role of the longtime sponsors of these teams are ignored in all this. (What, you think that these sponsors spend all this money without some assurance that they’re going to get a good return on their investment?)

Oh, that’s an interesting thought. Consider the AD’s weird quote about Te’o being the most trusting person he’d ever met; isn’t that the kind of language usually used by rape-victim-blamers regarding the accused?

Pete Thamel needs to have his degree revoked. Seriously?!? On two separate occasions, you can’t confirm any information so you just leave it out of the story? I did better than that when I was a high school journalist.

Uhmwut? That’s what fact checking is. If you can’t confirm something you don’t put it in the story, not “if you can’t confirm something you start a full blown investigation into whether that thing even exists.”

In this case the thing that couldn’t be confirmed was that this girl existed. Hindsight is 20/20 but it’s journalism 101 that if a story is too good to be true it probably isn’t. Thamel even says during the interview that the story Te’o is telling is “unbelievable.” Too bad he was speaking figuratively.

This happened in the fall of 2012 not in the bad old says of Stephen Glass, when it was a lot easier to make something up and get away with it. Now you may well say how was Thamel supposed to know he was dealing with a sociopathic liar? (If nothing else this interview confirms that Te’o’s account of what happened is utter bullshit).

Indeed, what I’ve found interesting about the handling of this case now is that ESPN and others have been framing the story as “Mante Te’o got Catfished!” and then somewhere in paragraph 8 noting that there’s some weirdness to that interpretation of events, given the rich amount of detail about personal interactions with multiple members of Te’o’s family that became part of the narrative around this girl’s death. Unless this was the most painstaking pointless hoax of all time, to the extent of getting at least one real woman to actually meet Te’o in person, spend hours on the phone with him, etc., then the most generous interpretation of events is that Te’o thought she was real but in the wake of her “death” decided to gild the lily as much as possible, whether to gin up sympathy or out of embarrassment at feeling so distraught over an internet girlfriend he’d never really met.

If the only person who had ever talked to her was T’eo, I think your point is much stronger. However as I mention below, his dad and his friend from back home allege to have talked to her frequently. So the “does she exist?” conspiracy involves at least three people now. I think you have to agree that three people making up the existence of a woman whole cloth is highly implausible (not that it didn’t happen!).

I can’t see how you can expect Thamel to suspect anything other than that there is something fishy. Are accidents with injuries always reported in the paper? You would know better than I, but unless every accident with injuries is expected to be in the paper I don’t know why this would be so shocking.

The Stanford thing strikes me as the most damning, since it doesn’t strike me as too hard to see if they have any record of her at all not just whether she is in the alumni registry or whatever.

But I don’t know that really rises to the level of “should never work in journalism AGAIN!!!”

I can’t see how you can expect Thamel to suspect anything other than that there is something fishy.

When you’re a journalist, that’s supposed to be enough.

Remember, Thamel was actually writing a feature here. It’s not like he just conducted an interview. He went out and started fact-checking, and that’s where he drops the ball.

I agree with you that when his entire family, his friends, etc. are talking about his girlfriend, you just sort of assume the girlfriend exists. But when you start doing your basic background (and fair credit to Thamel; he actually seems to have done actual journalism, verifying facts and suchly) and you hit THREE brick walls?

That’s when you go ‘okay, this is no coincidence.’ You go back to Te’o and say ‘hey, I’d love to talk to your girlfriends family’ or ‘do you know where she graduated from?’ or suchly. Either that or you chop her from the story entirely.

It’s a very egregious case of journalism malpractice.

Having said that…

Thamel actually did go to the trouble of looking shit up and verifying things. And we all fuck up occasionally. I would say that this isn’t a fireable offense if his work has otherwise been solid. But it’s definitely bad, the sort of thing where if he does ANYTHING else wrong his career can and should end.

I’m not sure he was speaking figuratively. He seemed to be challenging Te’o (albeit gently) on basic details relating to the timeline, where she lived and even her name. He says “this is unbelievable” when Te’o starts talking about Lennay being brought to tears by his voice while in a coma. I think this is actually a case where “this is unbelievable” doesn’t mean “Wow!” but “I don’t believe you.”

I don’t know Campos… Thamel had two different people (T’eo’s dad and a friend from back home) saying that they talked to her frequently… and specifically because T’eo supplied lots of information you are not likely to doubt that she exists. It’s also not like he tried to find some way to explain why they shouldn’t contact Stanford about her.

The red flags were that there was no evidence that she graduated from Stanford (including that the person she asked didn’t know her and it’s a small campus) and that there was no newspaper article about the accident.

What is your version of minimal journalistic due diligence that should have been done for the story to be published?

She was our business because Te’o and Notre Dame used her to hype his “story”. Devout Christian + star athlete + tragically dead love of his life…it’s practically made for ESPN. And almost certainly was.

Mormons believe in Jesus Christ as the literal firstborn Son of God and Messiah, his crucifixion as a conclusion of a sin offering, and subsequent resurrection.[51] However, Latter-day Saints (LDS) reject the ecumenical creeds and definition of the Trinity[52][53] (In contrast, the second largest Latter Day Saint denomination, the Community of Christ, is Trinitarian and monotheistic.) Mormons hold that the New Testament prophesied both the apostasy from the teachings of Christ and his apostles as well as the restoration of all things prior to the second coming of Christ.[54]

Some notable differences with mainstream Christianity include: A belief that Jesus began his atonement in the garden of Gethsemane and continued it to his crucifixion, rather than the orthodox belief that the crucifixion alone was the physical atonement;[55] and an afterlife with three degrees of glory, with hell (often called spirit prison) being a temporary repository for the wicked between death and the resurrection.[56] Additionally, Mormons don’t believe in creation ex nihilo, believing that matter is eternal, and creation involved God organizing existing matter.[57]

Kolob is a star or planet described in Mormon scripture. Reference to Kolob is found in the Book of Abraham, a work that is traditionally held by adherents of the Mormon faith as having been translated from some Egyptian papyrus scrolls by Joseph Smith, Jr., the founder of the Latter Day Saint (LDS) movement. According to this work, Kolob is the heavenly body nearest to the throne of God. While the Book of Abraham refers to Kolob as a “star”,[1] it also refers to planets as stars,[2] and therefore, some LDS commentators consider Kolob to be a planet.[3]

Kolob has never been identified with any modern astronomical object and is not recognized by scholars as a concept associated with any ancient civilization. Kolob is rarely discussed in modern LDS religious contexts, though the idea appears within LDS culture, including reference to Kolob in an LDS hymn.[4] It is periodically a topic of discussion in criticism of Mormonism.

What is your version of minimal journalistic due diligence that should have been done for the story to be published?

There’s a two-step process here.

If at any point (the Lexis-Nexis search, the Stanford search, etc.) he encounters verification of the facts as states by Te’o, he can stop. He doesn’t need to verify EVERYTHING. Like, if it turned out this girl had never been hit by a drunk driver and hadn’t ever done anything with children in New Zealand, but did actually exist and had gone to Stanford, nobody would give a fuck.

But when you do routine background checks and get a goose egg? At that point basic, standard journalistic standards require you to not go to press. Period. He can publish everything else about Te’o. But he can’t go to press about the girlfriend.

My hunch is that Te’o met a real person who was going by the name “Lennay Kekua,” and then was in phone, text, and Twitter contact with someone else purporting to be that same person. Because that matches up with some of the details of the story the Cardinals player told the other night about having met and chatted with “Lennay Kekua” himself.

Thus Te’o was both (1) falling for a con (coordinated by Tuiasosopo) and (2) making up his own far-fetched romantic tales while trying to embellish an otherwise embarrassing story about his intense feelings for someone he had virtually no tangible contact with.